I find it rather sad just how true that statement is. I have this sneaking suspicion that the OS X of today is the future of many operating systems, not just Windows. Oh well, I suppose that's a good thing, since at least it will hopefully drive development forward.

...but its not a progress bar but a meter of some type (bandwidth or audio?)...

Don't forget that even if the screen shots are real, they are of an OS that won't be released for many more months. Apple has been known to change things, sometimes a lot, (add/drop/polish features) in the final couple of months before release.

Apple's actually not at the high end of expenses in certain configurations anymore. It's not for the 3rd world but it is certainly much more price competitive than it used to be, especially in servers where the xServes are beating up Windows solutions left and right.

Well, OpenOffice's native file formats are basically an XML stylesheet.ZIPped with your information in text format...finally a file format that would be easy for other programs to use (it's an open standard) and file sizes are very reasonable too.

GIMP is impressive solely for the fact it's an open answer to Photoshop (c'mon, how many of you actually USE CMYK separations?) and it works. You have no excuse to use Photoshop Elements or Paint Shop Pro, because there is a Win32 version out there.

You have no excuse to use Photoshop Elements or Paint Shop Pro, because there is a Win32 version out there.

The GIMP is impressive in my opinion solely because of the speed it was developed, and the ground it covered to get to be a somewhat competative application. The GIMP certainly does not have to justify its existence to me, it can and will continue on without me using it. With that said...

I've tried The GIMP out, several times. The linux version and the Win32 version both. I can use CorelDRAW, Paint

Fine. That doesn't make it an original idea though. I didn't mean to imply anything about whether or not taking the idea was done legitimately, only that it was in fact taken. Which you don't seem to dispute:-)

Original ideas are overrated. I'm not impressed by something wildly new, especially in interface design -- just look at the shambling wreck that is Enlightenment to give an idea of how much "originality" can be a bad thing. I'm much more pleased to see competent integration of pre-existing, and poss

Jeff Raskin the original lead developer on the Macintosh (and the man responsible for it's name - it was his favorite eating apple) has largely debunked this as a myth. While I don't think he claims that Parc's work had NO influence on the Mac he has pointed out that many of the supposedly stolen concepts (such as the GUI itself) were present in his computer science thesis published in 1967 before Parc's existed. He also notes that some of the supposedly stolen concepts were already part of either the Mac or Lisa projects which were already under way BEFORE the infamous visit and that he (Raskin) had used others prior to his involvement with Apple itself. Further some concepts (such as drag-and-drop) were never used at Parc and others were used at Parc but not on the SmallTalk system which had been shown to Steve Jobs.
He sums up his take on the myth this way:

he Mac was by no means the work of one person, but the combined efforts of thousands in hundreds of companies large and small. It was not, as many accounts anachronistically relate, stolen from PARC by Steve Jobs after he saw the Alto running SmallTalk on a visit. For one thing the usual account (as in Levy's book, "Insanely Great" and others) denigrates the original and creative work done by all the Apple employees that put their hearts into the Mac. Most of the histories of the Mac were written without their authors interviewing the original team (Brian Howard, who contributed so much, is always missed), and the history of the Mac that Apple's own P/R department dispensed was based on Jobs's version. Many didn't speak with me: without knowing that I had worked out many of the key usability ideas when Jobs was still in grade school and before there was a Xerox PARC to learn from, it is perhaps understandable that people would find it necessary to invent a history that derives the Mac's genesis from the nearest similar work. The honest intellectual debt the Mac owes to the work at PARC was not a case of highway robbery.

Quoting from memorty (I can't find his orginal essay on the history of the mac) he attributes the persistance of the myth to the fact that both Steve Jobs and the former Parc guys retell it that way. Steve, because it reinforces his reputations as a visionary genius (HE understood the significance of the GUI when the suits at Xerox were blind, He saw "it was good" and he bid it be fruitful and multiply). The guys at Parc saw it that way because Steve really did "get it". What the Parc guys didn't realise is that Steve "got it" not because he was a visionary genius but because Jef Raskin (and others at Apple) had been patiently explaining the same concepts to him for years (going back to Jef Raskin visiting the Steve's back in their famous garage).

The Apple vs. Microsoft case is actually poor evidence in this situation. The legal question in that case was not whether a "look and feel" could be protected as intellectual property; that was actually assumed to be true. The question instead was whether Microsoft's license of Apple's "look and feel" for Windows 1.0 carried over into Windows 2.0. Apple contended that Windows 2.0 was such a different beast from Windows 1.0 that the original license didn't apply. Microsoft claimed that since 2.0 shared the same name as 1.0, it was clearly just a continuation of Windows. Unfortunately for Apple, the original licensing agreement for Windows 1.0 was extremely liberal, and Microsoft prevailed.

A better precedent for your argument is the canonical Lotus vs. Borland case, in which case it was ruled that a menu system was not artistic expression protected by copyright. Note that the first trial judge ruled against Borland, saying words like "Cut" and "Paste" could be changed to, e.g., "Snip" and "Dupe." Had his ruling stood, we'd have had to learn a new menu system for every software company, raising the barrier of entry for new software companies who would have had to invent new words and keyboard shortcuts for "File/Open" = Ctrl-O, and innovation would be even more stifled than it already is. Can you imagine shopping for cars if each company had a different mapping for left pedal = break, right pedal = gas?

ADC membership, by itself, is free. It's the premium options that cost money. So I suspect what you really meant is $0 for paying ADC members...;-)

Apple is giving all developers who attend the WWDC conference a free preview copy of Panther.

I suspect, incidentally, that you're right. There's a load of comments about it being free because it's an "odd numbered release". Bollocks. 10.1 was free because 10.0 was barely usable, not because it was an odd number. Jaguar is a good, mature, stable OS, Apple doesn't have to compensate people for using it...

the fact that 10.1 was "free". of course by free, I mean that you could go to an apple store and get an upgrade or pay 20 bucks to get the CD shipped to you, but that's a moot point compared to the 79 or 129 prices of 10.2. In all honesty 10.3 will probably be pay, as its another upgrade like 10.2 was i.e. lots of under the hood, and a few new/upgraded apps. I still say bring it on though.

Based on the 10.1-to-10.2 transition, probably not. The x.y.z (where the z varies) updates are free.
Geez... you're getting oodles of new features and can't cough up the modest price to support the company? Why do people always expect new software releases to be free and are outraged when they're not? Software isn't free. It takes developer and Q/A time (which is very expen

I was wondering if they'd be charging for it or if it would be a Software Update

I'm 100% certain it won't be distributed via direct download of Software Update. Just like with 10.0.x -> 10.1, it would be too big to download. It could be distributed like 10.1 (ie. for $20 or something like that), but I doubt it...

>Its a damned OS, its a TOOL.. its not some drug induced altered state of mind...

You're partially right - it's an OS, but it's also a user interface, and all of the changes shown in the screenshots are UI changes. It may be jargon that reeks of marketspeak, but "experience" is actually a fairly useful way of thinking about how people work with UIs. It's more than file management and app launching, it's the utility of system alerts and messages, the clarity of the typeface, the ease with which the user understands what's going on, the myriad ways the user's time using the interface is helped or hindered by the UI design.

Improving the the capabilities of the spam filtering in Apple's Mail.app program is nice, but I wonder if they've fixed any of the *REAL* problems? There are so many problems that Macintouch [macintouch.com] has PAGES of reader reports of issues. [macintouch.com]

Like, the fact that the application kills its own preferences if your drive runs out of space.

Or the problem of attachments being destroyed when sent if they have a resource fork.

I switched to Mail.app for a day, but switched back to Entourage when I discovered these serious issues, as well as the lack of interface behavior controls (like the fact that Mail.app automatically marks an email viewed in the preview pane as "read", when I don't want it to).

With an app as buggy as Mail.app is, I don't understand why they haven't released a maintenence update already? I mean they've updated iSync and iPod and other tools so many times in the past few months.

The Mac needs a decent email app. Entourage corrupts mailboxes (and is from M$), Eudora hasn't gotten any real improvements since version 3 (no, I don't consider advertising an improvement), and MailSmith suffers from lack of UI controllability (much like Mail.app).

It did receive fixes. Before some 10.2.x update, Mail.app would have serious problems with nested IMAP folders. I reported the bug to apple and they fixed it.All I have to complain about is that with large folders it appears to stall indexing them but simply quitting and restarting it clears the issue (and no, Force Quit doesn't destroy anything). Also I wouldn't mind if it had parallel IMAP/POP connections but as far as I'm concerned I'm very pleased by it.

Sure. I've got a 900 MB mailbox I can't send email from anymore because if I send more than 2 attachments, it replaces the additional ones with randomly-selected email from my Inbox. I had to create a new Identity (thus making a new mailbox file) in order to continue working. At least I can easily reference my old mailbox. (And, yes, I've already tried all the rebuild functions and whatnot.)

M$ was willing to help with it, but only if I sent them my mailbox file. Riiiiigghhht. I

like the fact that Mail.app automatically marks an email viewed in the preview pane as "read", when I don't want it to

Yes, how dare Mail.app mark a message "read" when it's been viewed! I think it should only be marked as "read" after I'd read it, and considered the spiritual nature of it's consequences. When will apple correct this deficiency???

No mention of that.I hope it's there - Yahoo for OS X has had video for ages and it's a lot less useful than voice.Another thing I'd like is a better shortcut key set than they have. I don't want to *always* keep a mouse in hand.Also a way to minimize all windows at once...I don't see another $140 of value here yet...

I live in Japan - my family lives in the states. Reason enough for me.I have 8 Mbit DSL - I can do full voice and video on a PC.People always told me that Macs were better at Audio/Video.(Has that changed?)

I want to know if that's really Apple's new idea of Aqua for window title bars, etc. It does not gel consistently with the background bars. Look at the system prefs pic, it has pinstripes whereas the others do not. The background bars are usually slightly translucent in 10.2 as well, why is that gone in this 10.3 shot? Also, why would Apple leave a more obvious pinstripe on the menu bar and remove it elsewhere? Either Apple has abandoned consistency within Aqua itself or this is a horrible theming job

2) Where's the advanced spam filtering mentioned? I just see the normal Mail.app screen.

3) I don't see the Safari driven finder either. It's just the normal finder window with a brushed metallic look. (I still haven't made up my mind on the metallic. I don't hate it, but it's not lickable like the rest of the OS)

3) I don't see the Safari driven finder either. It's just the normal finder window with a brushed metallic look. (I still haven't made up my mind on the metallic. I don't hate it, but it's not lickable like the rest of the OS)

I don't think that's a Safari-driven finder. I think Safari is the active app, and the rest of the apps are ghosted.

As far as the brushed metal look goes, there's a hack for OSX that lets users make all the windows brushed metal, or make none of them brushed metal. (I read about it

That is to say, I love iTunes. It is the easiest, most pleasant way to organize and listen to your digital music collection. But did anybody notice the process monitor shot? iTunes is still sitting there taking almost twice the cycles of the notoriously-bloated-and-CPU-hogging MS Word. That's worse than the performance I got out of iTunes from two versions ago!

What's with all the "brushed metal"-looking programs this time around? I thought Apple was going for UI consistancy. Surely having a bunch of built-in programs that look totally different from everything else on the system defeats the purpose here? And if you must violate your own UI consistancy standards, you should at least do it for something less ugly-looking than brushed metal. Ew!

First, I'm really really really pissed off because I wrote this whole message and then accidentally deleted it. Seems you can't control-Z in these input boxes.

Second, I think these shots are fake, too. I hope they are for some of the reasons outlined below. I'll be going into a lot less detail in light of the fact that I'm having to type it all again. I did do an Observation/Conclusion thing, but this time I'll just make the observations and you can make your own conclusions.

I have only skimmed the thread, so apologies if these points have been brought up. Just seemed like everyone was "WOOHOO"ing without really looking closely. And similarity to other posts is just coincidence.

OBSERVATION: In the Activity Monitor window there are strange inconsistencies.

* Second, the "% Nice" uses a , to seperate the decimals, not a . like the rest of the %'s. This smacks to me of a slip-up by someone European making the fakes.

* Third, the "Threads" and "Processes" don't line up right. Unless this is a very early build, it's very sloppy.

OBSERVATION: Yahoo Instant messenger is in the dock and on the desktop. If this is Panther, that presumably means no Yahoo support in iChat.

OBSERVATION: In the full screen of the expose desktop, Safari is all blocked out. Why? What incriminating website could he/she be looking at?

OBSERVATION: Why are the iChat windows censored totally? Why not just block them out like the Safari window?

OBSERVATION: About Finder is all wrong. "The Macintosh Desktop Experience"? And why "Finder version 10.3" rather than "Mac OS X (10.3)" like we'd expect? These aren't big things, obviously, but still...

OBSERVATION: No build number. Seems strange, since they'll most likely be giving out preview copies on Monday, and developers will want to know what build they're working with. If it's the final release, how did slip-ups like above creep in?

OBSERVATION: In the iChat window, it says "There is no camera attached to this computer." Yet the progress bar seems to be showing activity of some sort?

OBSERVATION: The Finder window named Xdrive is metal, but not entirely consistently. The metal has a bar down the right, next to the scroll bar, unlike Safari. This on its own is nothing that important, but the grow icon thing in the bottom right seems misplaced.

OBSERVATION: In the Mail screenshot, the "Working Offline" seems all wrong. Especially the "o" in working.

It just seems all wrong to me. I'm bound to end up with egg on my face, but I thought these items needed discussion.

- Jimmni

[/quote]

Points worth thinking about.

(tig)"We do not inherit the land from our ancestors""We borrow it from our children"

Second, the "% Nice" uses a , to seperate the decimals, not a . like the rest of the %'s. This smacks to me of a slip-up by someone European making the fakes.

Or making the screenshots. On a French Canadian system, for example, you'll get commas for decimals in every application that displays decimal numbers. Not that I'm espousing one opinion or another. Just that whoever did these may have been a French or Spanish speaker who temporarily switched their language to English for the screenshots... and nu

OBSERVATION: In System Preferences, several things seem to be missing. Login Items, ColorSync, and Internet don't seem to fit in with anything else. I love the idea of.Mac and Print & Fax being their own panels, though.

OBSERVATION: The "More Info" button in the About Finder window, which launches Apple System Profiler, is missing.

OBSERVATION: System Preferences is an inactive window (titlebar widgets aren't colored), and the titlebar is not translucent.

Observation: The brushed metal Finder window includes what appears vaguely to be a list of mounted volumes (along with a Network icon). However, the disk image icon is that of an image file, not a mounted volume!

OBSERVATION: In the same Finder window, the Xdrive volume is selected in blue, and what appears to be an Applications (Mac OS 9) folder behind it (no menu transparency!) is ALSO selected, making it unclear which item the displayed menu would apply to. It seems REALLY strange to have a toolbar button with a menu that contains precisely the same menu items that are also in the main system menu bar. Contextual menus are neat time-savers, but that's just stupid. Apple does seem to like non-descript graphical labels like that, though (see iTunes - grrrr!).

OSX has had a built in firewall since at least Jaguar, and I seem to remember it being there in 10.1 as well. I seem to recall people writing that it's just standard *nix ipfw, but I can't find anything at the moment to verify this. In any case, given the choice between high quality freeware firewall software, and commercial software that might or might not be as good but certainly would require some kind of licensing fees, Apple has seemed more than willing to go with the FOSS stuff when bringing in new OS

more and more/. posts, comments, and 'reviews' of
updates to OSs focus soley on the eye candy, and
ignore issues of whats changed under the hood to
actually make the OS better. It would be sad
indeed if we have reached the point in OS development where all that matters is if the
title bar is brushed metal or something else.

The activity viewer is a nice GUI improvement over the Process Viewer in the Jaguar Utilities folder (which is just a simple GUI for ps). This will make a nice helper for telephone tech support people trying to get grandma's computer problem licked. Note that the title bar of this window isn't "metal" or "blue courderoy" as we know them today. Looking at other screen shots this appears to either be a tip off that these are fake or an indication of a subtle interface theme evolution.

Expose' looks like a neat feature but probably more complex than most people will want to deal with. I'm also curious how the corner activation behavior will work with multiple screens.

The one panel Finder window looks like a very cool user interface improvement to tackle problems of novice users ("I have to dig so deep to get to my home folder" and "why can't I have a simple desktop like OS 9") The new highlighting method (blue rounded rectangle around the filename) looks like a nice eye candy improvement.

System Preferences has gotten rid of ColorSync, My Account, and Login Items. Combined Desktop and Screen Savers. Combined mouse & keyboard. Added a Print & Fax icon. Added icons for Security and Expose'. Hopefully this indicates a trend of trying to integrate tools from the Utilities folder into the System Preferences.

While all of these are nice changes (and I will be first in line to buy my copy), I don't think these changes alone are compelling justifications of a large upgrade price for an experienced user. I hope Apple will backport any security and bug fix updates for Panther back to Jaguar for those users who don't find the upgrade makes sense.

Steve Jobs come on stage, talks about lots of nifty new stuff for a long while, then prepare to go away, turn back to face the crowd...

"Oh, and one more thing, I almost forgot to talk about Panther..."... Demonstrate Panther live...

Audience yawns, somebody yells "We already saw the sceenshots!"

Steve looks a little bit disoriented "euh, yes, hum"...

But quickly recovers "Oh, and one more thing, we have at the back a demonstration machine of the new PowerMacs coming to market next month, you are really going to shit in your pants with these"

A few Apple guys come on stage with a machine described by Steve as a dual G5 (970) 2GHz, audience yawns, somebody yells "Yes, we have known for THREE BLOODY DAYS".

Steve positively looks finished, his face looking down, his speech notes fall from his hands, the lights on stage dim out while he slowly turns to exit, he advances near the back of the stage, and stops!

A spot lights up on him, his hunched body straightens up, he turns back to face the crowd with a small smile on his face, advance to the podium with long strides and start speaking:

"You will have to excuse me but I almost forgot this one LAST thing due to ship in two month."

Curtains open, revealing another machine which Jobs describes as a dual PPC G5 (970) 2.5GHz with more bells and whistles than you can shake a stick at to an audience that stays here gobsmacked, not believing what they see.

After having written this I guess I will be labeled a deluded Mac Zealot but the truth is that while MacOSX makes me drool (figuratively of course) I never owned a Mac myself but if I was in Steve Jobs position with a long string of surprises at previous keynotes and with a new architecture that cannot be too surprising in itself given how badly it is needed and expected I probably would manufacture some rumours and faked leaks to dull people's expectancy into a big surprise and then I would use a wild card to shock and awe (to reuse an already overused term) the audience by its unexpectedness as much as by its intrinsic quality. Of course this is assuming that Apple does have such a card up its sleeve.

What is crazier then the images is the fact that those of us going to WWDC next week are going to pay Apple up to 2 grand to let us drink their kool-aid..............and get to talk directly to the engineers, marketing, etc. But hey.

i think it is certainly slashdot material, despite the absence of hyping the X11 that will be in it. the upgrade fee is significant, but nothing like m$ considering the absence of serial numbers and other mitigating factors that make it a really easily attainable option to anyone.

there are some big differences graphically and at the core, if nothing else in that this release will bring native applications that are based on existing x11 applications. slashdot is pretty late and pretty conservative on this

First off, I assume you don't think this is EVERYTHING that is likely new in 10.3.

Secondly, some of these things do look to be significantly new..... as far as look and feel, of course it's the same.... what would be the point in dramatically changing the look and feel?

Feature-wise though, Expose looks like a very nice addition, as are labels.... not sure what Folder Actions are, but they could also be an interesting addition..... the new drive view also looks like it could be an improvement.

You move your mouse to a corner of the screen, which handles some type of window.

After some delay, all windows not of that type are hidden. Windows of that type are zoomed out (shrunk) until all fit on the desktop.

Click on a window to zoom back onto it.

It's really an elegant solution to window clutter. It's either this or virtual desktops, and Apple probably would dislike virtual desktops due to the "where the hell did my windows go" factor. With Quartz, all the zooming should give the user usable visual feedback as to what's going on.

Why did Apple have to toss out all the UI lessons they'd learned since 1984?

You know, I have a TiBook and I'm very happy with it, but I have to echo your question.

OSX is better than the competition, but it drives me nuts how it fails to live up to its potential. The old Mac OS sucked at a technical level, but I greatly prefer the interface. The NeXT interface was far better than Aqua as well, in my opinion. I'd love to have the option to make OSX look and act like either.

If you are using the 'Graphite' appearance instead of the 'Blue' appearance, closing the wrong window can be a big problem. In 'Blue' the buttons are multicolored like you said, and it's easy to see which one is active. In 'Graphite' the buttons are just less faint and it's easy to make a mistake.

I found MacOS9 much less than a "well-refined user interface". Why? Well, let me list a few items that come to mind:

1. When MacOS boots, only some extensions are shown loading up (with the associated puzzle piece icons). Why are some hidden while others get icons? Any logic to it whatsoever? Why is there no way to find out what one is during the boot sequence? As it is, one has to go

They don't because they don't believe it will make them money. Seriously.

Using GNOME or KDE in their next release would be a horrible idea for Apple. And here's why.... this really isn't an attack on you or the GNOME/KDE teams. Some of this is going to seem harsh, but I'm stating my opinion. Please don't take it personally, or as a slam to KDE or GNOME, since I do actually like both of these projects, even though I don't think they (or Apple, for that matter) are the best thing since sliced neko bread.

Apple already just recently (well, 10.0) totally changed their UI and user experience from what it had been for a decade. That pissed off a lot of hardcore old users. Apple doesn't need to go alienating their users again. (And no, I don't feel that the Aqua themes "count". They're pretty, but they're not "there", from my recollection.)

Performance-wise? The most recent releases of GNOME and KDE felt slower on my 866 MHz i686 machine than 10.2 did on my 700 MHz PPC750. Apple really doesn't need their OS getting slower, especially on their low-end machines, which people here already bitch and taunt as being horribly underpowered.

Finally... what do you mean, exactly, by "little incompatibilities"? Are you throwing this out to make your post look balanced, or did you have something specific in mind? I couldn't think of anything off hand... until I realized that switching to GNOME or KDE would likely mean GTK+ or QT, which would involve changing the entire desktop API for every Mac OS application. This is not! a "little" incompatibility. Making some sort of Cocoa wrapper would be a huge pain in the ass, no matter how good a coder you are. That would still be better than forcing every OS X developer to rewrite their application (again, if it used to be an old OS 9- program). This would be a huge waste of Apple's time and money and probably piss off their developers to no end.

Really finally, now, as a matter of personal opinion, I do actually like the whole OS X UI system better than GNOME or KDE. The legions of rabid and not-so-rabid Apple loyalists would probably agree with me, since OS X probably at least tries to follow whatever Apple's UI standards are. Not only are GNOME and KDE "not Apple", but the UI experience is different. So I don't think Apple would garner support from their users by switching.

The image is supposed to be showcasing a new feature called "expose" (it these are real that is), which should help managing your windows. Take a look at the preferences [opinionstick.com].

Also you'll notice, that foreground windows are shaded grey and have coloured stoplight buttons, while the unfocused window is plain white and has monochrome stoplight buttons. So, apparently unfocused titlebars are not translucent anymore.

I really hope those screenshots are either fake or just plain unpolished/unfinished. Jaguar looks way better IMHO.

It scales all windows so that they can all fit on hte screen at once showing you everything you're doing - you lcik on one and they revert to their normal state but with the selected window in the forground.

OS X has excellent reliability and stability. Thankfully that's one thing BSD and NeXT helped them achieve from the get go. While I agree that eye candy is fluffy and useless, there is a HUGE issue in between those, and that is USABILITY.

OS X was criticized early on by MacOS fanatics who thought they changed too much. In retrospect some of the changes were good, and some were bad. Regardless, OS X still has a long way to go to reach it's usability potential. There's lots of room for aquafying CLI tool

The big deal about panther ( internally at the kernel level ) is 64-bit support for the upcomming powerpc970 mac's and much better threading and smp. The rumour on FreeBSD 5.0 code being included is whats probably helping OSX in this area. Also X will officially be supported by Apple and they have their own special version that is better tuned just for the mac. Gcc 3.2x is included which is nice if your a c++ developer who likes to use STL in your programs.

Panther will be alot better for smp Xserve boxes, and Java Servlets. (Java uses threading heavily as opposed to seperate processes). Yahoo even turned down Java for PHP because FreeBSD 4.x did not have good threading. Remember that previous versions of MacOSX used FreeBSD 4.2 and 4.4 for alot of the internals. SMP support in FreeBSD 4.x = Linux 2.0.

Macs have great UI's and if you use a computer as a workstation, a good as well as flexible gui is nice to have. Also apple uses better resolution icon's and heavy colors so its visual apealing to your eye's. Even the fonts are professionally done with heavy R&D so they are not too blury and easy to read. Try MacOSX for a week and kde, gnome and even Windows will be painfull.

Remember that Apple makes workstations, desktops, and laptops are for consumers so UI is extremely important unlike tradional unixies. They are not made for computer experts. Graphical artists are Apple's main customers who are obsessed with detail. The gui is as important if not more then stability for this market. Internals are not that important.

I have never used MacOSX but I was told that its not as stable as big iron unix's like Solaris or even Linux. It came out a little too early and was quite slow.

Both reliablity and speed improved as the OS matured. But its a hell of alot more stable then MacOS9 or Windows95x. The api's are more solid as well which make bugs less apearent for third party apps that use them.

Well spoken!
Either slashdot should retract all articles that might be read on other news sites, or at least apologise profusely for being so redundant.
In fact, Slashdot should really just close up shop since all they do is repeat articles and news easily gleaned from browsing through 5 or 10 thousand websites, and a few hundred newsgroups.
Admit it Slashdot, you're just a wanna be;)

Apple has been releasing (paid for) OS updates at a rate of about 1 per year for the last 5 years. Every 6 months or so, they release a free update. With OS X there have been more frequent patches and updates, but in general the 1 OS update per year hasn't really changed.

Why is this? Is the system software really changing that dramatically? What makes the older versions of X so hard to support?

A quick answer: in the "Macintosh universe" (for lack of better word) it is much more common to purchase your OS as OEM than it is in the "Windows-Intel unverse". 100% of Macs are being sold with an OEM MacOS (even those that are sold with Linux pre-installed). I don't know the exact figures for x86 machines, but they are obviously nowhere near the 100% figure. If you are a Windows developer, the Windows 95/98 users are still an important client group for you. But if you are a MacOS developer, you don't pay much attention to the MacOS 8.1 users, since they are probably also stuck with pre-1998 machines, and if they didn't cough out money for a new machine in 5-6 years, they will probably neither cough out it for your application. On the other hand, every new Mac that was recently sold was also sold with a recent MacOS. So you don't have to worry, like your Windows counterpart, "is the market ready for a XP-only application". You KNOW that the market is ready for Jaguar-only apps - so why waste your time and energy for MacOS 9.x?

where they assuming that Apple users can't distinguish right from left ?

I don't know about Mac users, but I know plenty of Windows users who can't seem to tell right from left. If I only had a nickel for every time this exchange has taken place during a tech support call I have taken from a Windows user:

Me: "Okay, now right-click on that icon to bring up the context menu, and select 'Properties' from it."Them: "Ok, I clicked on it, but the icon just goes dark."Me: "Did you click, or right-click?"Them: "What do you mean, 'right-click'?Me: "Right-click, as in, click the right mouse button."Them [astonished]: "You mean it does *something else*???"

Let me tell you how Apple came to use the horrible, one-button mouse. When they were developing the Lisa and Mac, they were also hiring scads of employees to do admin & custodial jobs and other non-techie stuff. Many of them had never touched a computer before, and Apple used them for testing to find the optimal number of buttons on the mouse. One is the correct number of buttons for the uninitated user, as borne out by usability testing. When people get used to their machine and learn the ins and outs of the OS, they can cough up a couple bucks for a multi-button mouse with lots of bells and whistles.

Finally, I do believe that recent changes to Apple's nomenclature indicate that the new towers to be announced Monday will include a multi-button mouse with a scroll wheel-- the mouse that comes with the consumer level systems has been changed from "Pro Mouse" to just plain "Mouse," and I think the new keyboard that has begun shipping with those systems is likewise simply named "Keyboard." This could indicate that the "professional" desktop Macs are going to ship with more feature-laden mice and keyboards than the machines aimed at Grandma and other first-time computer users.

Apple is quite clear on this point when you read the developer documentaion of the UI.

Brushed Metal is for all "digital lifestyle" applications. That is, applications that control such devices or use/manipulate the data from those devices (photos, music, video, contacts).

Aqua is for everything else (graphics, sound, animation, text). If an application is not used primarily to interface with digital lifesyle devices, it should use the standard Aqua theme.

Apple's thinking was that this provides a distinction between a "general use" app and a "limited use" app. iPhoto is an exreemely useful app, only if you have lots of photos and/or a digital camera. Photoshop is useful without either. The brushed metal interface also somewhat mimics the curent fad of bright metal cases on consumer devices, much like stereo equipment from the 70s. This is a subliminal "ease of use" thing.

That's a hell of a decision to make from a very few images and comments of dubious origins.

Apple has almost always been very conservative with their version numbering schemes. They're not ones to jump to the next whole integer just for the glitz of it.

When 11.0 is released it will either be one of two things:1. A complete re-write and restructuring of the underlying OS and APIs in a new language or for a new processor/system technology. The re-write will be totally invisible to the end user who will have

Grrr. I am by no means a mac fanatic but the powerpc architecture is quite supperior and yes you are half right. Motorolla is a big problem to this once cool risc based design.

Yes the g4 sucks goatballs compared to your system. No arguments from me here. The reason for this is your 2001 cpu is actually newer then Motorolla's G4! The G4 is well over 5 years old. Imagine using a pentium or pentium pro today? It was designed in 1997 and came out in late 98/early 99.

They have really screwed Apple and I am glad they finally booted them off their platform.

Traditionally PowerPC based macs were twice as fast as Windows machines or close to the same speed for half the price during the mid 1990's.

What changed is Motorolla's commitment, the cheaper development of wintel boxes, and the AMD vs Intel war.

Motorolla's shareholders do not want to upgrade their chip facilities as well as invest R&D for cutting edge chip designs. Its expensive and the embedded market is more profitable for them.

Then why are G4's expensive? Motorolla must use Intel for chip development. Intel of course charges the competition alot. Second to meet shareholders expectations they need to raise the price of their G3's and G4's and use the money to create embedded chips so they can claim they are growing on their SEC sheets.

Third, G4's are slow because they were designed in the 1990's and use ancient SDRAM technology. The new DDR based mac's have a chipset to slow down access from the memory to the cpu! Yes the pci based devices can use the newer memory but not the crippled g4's.

Motorolla even tried to make a g4 with full ddr support via the G5, but did not plan on improving any radical performance boasts. They were still planning to charge an arm and a leg and provide a inferior solution. After all they owned a monopoly on the cpu for the mac right? Wrong.

Anyway the new IBM built 64 bit macs in which Panter is designed for are very very fast. Go read some preliminayr leaked benchmarks at macslash.org for more info.

IBM wants to make cheap blade servers running AIX so they needed to mass produce a slimmed down version of their power4 processor. Apple is perfect for creating large bulk to reduce costs for IBM. The powerpc970 aka g5 aka power4-lite is a slimmed down power4 powerpc based processor. It can easily beat a pentiumIII 3ghz hands down in most benchmarks( real, not photoshop ). For things like encryption key building its almost twice as fast.

But the cool thing about this is that they use so little watts. Risc processors make great laptops.

What you say it true for at least the next couple of months. I would not touch a mac today. However by christmass....:-)